Page:Life in Java Volume 1.djvu/288

270 left until they are over-ripe, thereby entailing a deterioration in the quality and a delay in the delivery of the sugar, and thus bringing the planters into disagreeable collision with Government, which, in the face of such difficulties, expects to receive their produce as punctually as usual. Those, therefore, who had to pay for unavoidable remissness contended that since the Government had thought proper to institute free labour, its agents ought to. make allowances for unavoidable delays; as, like all Europeans in Java, they must be aware that the Javanese, without the pressure of superior power, fall into those procrastinating, lazy habits common to all Asiatics, thereby rendering it impossible to carry on all the processes of sugar-making with the regularity formerly usual in the factories.

We remained in Surabaya four days, waiting for our passport from the Governor-General, to enable us to visit the Yorsten-Landen, or land of